Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“I can’t wear your coat,” Bret said sharply.

“Now don’t be like that, fellow. I was only kidding. I want you to wear my coat, I’m crazy for you to wear it. Hell, I trust you, Lieutenant. You got to learn to recognize a friendly crack.”

You talk too much, Bret thought, and I don’t like your line of patter. What kind of cheap Hollywood character had he got tied up with? Still, this man had dragged him out of a bad situation and brought him home to sleep in his own bed. He couldn’t very well snub him because he walked too lightly or because his conversation was fast and tinny. “You’re the doctor,” he said a little heavy. “I’m very much obliged to you.”

Larry picked up the blue uniform and folded it over his arm. “I’ll rush this over to the tailor’s before you change your mind. If you want that milk I promised you, the icebox is right through there.” He pointed through the open door of the living room. “Hey, wait a minute. I almost forgot your stuff in the pockets.” His fingers went through them rapidly, piling the things on the bed: handkerchief, comb, letters, address book, key case, wallet, some crumpled newspaper clippings.

“Give me that.” Bret strode toward him and snatched the clippings from his hands, but not before Larry had seen what they were.

“Sure, sure,” Larry said. The guy was beginning to get on his nerves, and he was even a little afraid of him for a minute. Taylor was supposed to be nuts after all, and you never could tell about a nut. Ordinary people, if you got in a jam with them, you could chop down and leave them lie, but there was something about a nut that drained the guts out of you. He was nuts himself to bring a nut like Taylor home to his apartment. What kind of a comic did he think he was, playing jokes on himself like that? The guy could have murdered him in his sleep.

“Sure,” he repeated. “Don’t get the idea I was trying to interfere with your stuff.”

“I guess I was abrupt,” Bret said. “It’s just that I’ve got some things marked in these papers. Food for thought,” he added clumsily.

“Food for thought” is the word, Larry said to himself. His courage came flowing back and made him gay. Christ, the guy didn’t know a thing, not a damn thing! He, Larry, knew it all and he, Larry, was sitting on top of the situation, playing a sucker with his own dice for any stakes he wanted to name. The dope Taylor had nothing on him and never would; it was the other way round and he was going to remember that. He nearly felt sorry for the dope, but not quite. It never paid to feel sorry for anybody.

He almost ran on his way to the tailor’s shop, he felt so light and gay. He didn’t know what irony was, but it was irony he was enjoying. Here he was, running errands for Taylor, of all people. Living with him, lending him clothes, sleeping in the same room. And all the time with a double century in his hip pocket for not laying eyes on the guy. If money really talked the way Paula West thought it did, he’d be in Nevada by now. But it was more interesting here and he had the money anyway, and plenty more where that came from. All he had to do was name it and he could have it.

He felt quite disappointed and betrayed when he got back to his apartment and found that Taylor had left. There was a note under a full milk bottle on the kitchen table:

Excuse me for running out, but I have some urgent business. Thank you again for everything, and please don’t worry about your suit.

B. Taylor.

Oh well, Taylor would be back, he could count on that. Taylor was the kind of guy that would have to come back to give him back his suit. He wasn’t like that himself, praise God, but he’d met the type once or twice before in his life: the type that was so honest it hurt.

It was after ten when Bret reached the Golden Sunset Café. The place was deserted except for a few early barflies. It was chilly and desolate in the morning, like a fever patient who began each day with a low temperature and rose to a peak of delirium in the hot evening. The long room was like an image of his own hangover, run-down and almost empty, containing like a corrupt memory the odors of rancid grease and stale whisky spillings.

Fortunately neither of the bartenders who had witnessed the fight was on duty this morning. He had never seen the man behind the bar, a young man with thin round features like an emaciated infant’s, wearing pockets of gray flesh, puckered like chicken-skin, under his indeterminate pale eyes. Rollins?

An excitement that gave him no strength took hold of the lower half of his body and shook him visibly. He sat down in the booth nearest to the door and reasoned with himself. He couldn’t expect Rollins to be able to tell him anything. The police had questioned him long ago and found out merely that Lorraine had left by herself that night. Even if Rollins knew something more he had no reason to suppose that he could get it out of him. Still, the excitement would not stay down. It rose to his head and made him dizzy, so that Rollins’s face, if it was Rollins, wavered behind the bar and the stagnant air in the room buzzed like an electric bell.

“What’ll you have?” A waitress with a dark pitted face had come out of the kitchen at the back and was standing calmly over him like an attendant.

He recalled that he hadn’t eaten since noon of the previous day. “Fried eggs with toast?”

“Yeah. We got some bacon today if you want it.”

“Good. And bring me a quart of milk right away.” His dehydrated palate still regretted the bottle of milk he had left unopened, as a sign of his independence, on Harry Milne’s kitchen table.

“A quart of milk?” The waitress raised one heavy black eyebrow. “You want it spiked with anything?”

“No, thanks. I’m a milk addict.”

She stood and watched him drink it as if that were one for the book. Then she watched him eat his bacon and eggs.

“You were hungry,” she said. They never tipped you in the morning, anyway – the jerks that came to this joint had to be boiled before you could peel a nickel off their palms – so you might as well act natural.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m a food addict too.”

She laughed even if he didn’t, and what do you know, he gave her a buck and told her to keep the change. Things were looking up in the joint, and for a moment she forgot her varicose veins and almost stopped wishing that one of these A-bombs would explode directly over the roof of the Golden Sunset Café and destroy several square miles of L.A. with her in it.

“Is that James Rollins behind the bar?” Bret asked her.

“Uh-huh. That’s Jimmie.”

All but one of the barflies had drifted out. Rollins, who had just set up a boilermaker for the old man who remained, was manicuring himself with the blade of a pocketknife, scowling in bored concentration.

“Tell him I’d like to talk to him, will you? Over here.”

“Sure thing,” the waitress said, and went to the bar.

Rollins came through the little door at the front end and walked toward Bret with quick, jerky steps. “What can I do for you, my friend?”

“Please sit down.”

“Why not?” He sat down facing Bret across the table, his pale round forehead still furrowed by the blank scowl.

Bret said slowly: “You were on duty here the night that Mrs. Lorraine Taylor was murdered.”

A sneer of mental effort curled Rollins’s lips and left them tight. “Yeah. Yeah, I was. So what?”

“I’d like you to tell me what you saw of her.”

“You a cop?” he said in his quick monotone. “I already told my story to the cops.”

Bret took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and folded it small. A rodent brightness glimmered faintly in the eyes across the table. “No, I’m not a cop. I’m interested in what happened to Mrs. Taylor.”